Zane is seriously awful and MH3 is nearly impossible with him without perfect gear

Hes my favorite vault hunter, I started with and continued on to 50. Since then ive brought an amara and fl4k to MH3. There is no comparing the three, Zane just doesn’t belong in MH3. I’m sure with all the perfect gear and everything being completely optimized he can work but this is nonsense.

Playing as zane feels like having a massive Handicap and barrier to entry that other characters don’t have to deal with. Im just venting. And few are going to agree with me, I’ll likely get flamed or told im trolling and it’s whatever.

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While I don’t think Zane is “Seriously Awful” you’re not going to find much Argument that he needs a serious buff to be competitive with the other VHs.

I think the biggest issue is Zane is actually pretty balanced and you can basically build him anyway you want and have similar results. Where this comes into conflict is when you look at Zane at the same time as the other VHs, who are absurdly powerful in their ability to mob and kill bosses.

Zane is more gear dependent, 2/3 of his action skills don’t scale well into M3 and the third completely blinds you.

The most fun you have (in my opinion) is with Cryo Zane which doesn’t perform well against Bosses or Annointed(which are really the hardest things to fight)

So yeah Zane needs a buff, but he’s also a ton of fun despite his issues.

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You’re not wrong, he does need a buff. The main problem I found with him, is that his skills right now depend on cryo (the least dependable element), killing enemies in fast succession (and MH3 enemies are tough and unusable in bosses) and his pets (that don’t scale well).

Aside from all that, his barrier and speed based damage still work well in MH3. With the excpetion of the cryo dependency of the barrier, it can make him very tanky and with a absorb/reflect shield it’s enough to run through enemy fire and get out alive.

Zane’s performance is too predicated on meeting certain conditions. Additionally even if you get a legendary com chances are it won’t be very useful or complement any build you are going for in a meaningful way. I understand the frustration because until I was able to download a save game from a YouTube with a lot of great gear Zane was frustrating me on Mayhem 1 (I am not great at this game).

Zane needs some buffs that help you when your action/kill skills are in cool down. I almost feel railroaded into CCC, a gear specific build (facepuncher/relic/unlimited ammo), or a seeing red build. Double barrel can be very powerful but it doesn’t address your main point that it is very gear specific.

For people that start with Zane and don’t roll with other vh’s getting the gear you need to feel powerful can be frustrating. I have a Moze level 50 character and it’s obvious how she is a lot more even than Zane. During peak times when both action skills are active and the kills are rolling Zane doesn’t feel terribly behind Moze, but if you don’t have the skill/gear to keep the kills going he falls terribly flat.

If you get your hands on a fire cutsman it will help with the anointed problem, it also damages the militants even if they have their shields up.

yeah man gearbox pls just buff zane to output about 200% gun dmg through passives. thanks. lul.

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Fix barrier particles and make old-u not clunky and ill be happy.

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Well, until now no change has been made to Zane’s abilities, perhaps Gearbox is evaluating, through the various feedbacks of the forum, what’s wrong with him and what should be improved. You’re right, Zane is stressful to use, many conditions to be met to get a little more damage and legendary CMODs are useless compared to those of other VHs, except for some that could offer more. What I hate most about him is Violent Momentum, it makes me nervous because I can’t shoot from a standstill to do more damage. I doubt Zane receives a radical change with future patches, but you never know.

In different streams they’ve talked about how they’re having a really good look at Zane and plan to buff his output in some ways.

But temper your expectations, Players and Devs are rarely on the same page for buffs/nerfs

The player is (almost) always right, just look at the current state of battleborn to understand the incompetence of some “developers”. In my opinion, the only Borderlands good from an RPG standpoint was TPS, but not this one.

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Personally I think GBX is afraid to Buff Zane wrong.

I don’t think their afraid of having powerful characters, look at Amara, she crushes EVERYTHING with her He-Man thighs and GBX is fine with that.

But if they make a bunch of changes and Zane still underperforms? It’ll make them look real bad.

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Depends on what you mean by perfect gear. I wasn’t able to play on Mayhem 3 until I got some really good gear that synergizes well, but there is still plenty of stuff I am keeping my eye out for. I don’t have all optimal annointments for my gear and I am still looking for Class Mods and artifacts with better skills and perks. But yes, I couldn’t handle Mayhem 3 until I found gear that fits his Cryo build.

I have no problem with M3 at all. I am actually waiting for M4 because unless I get triple negative mayhem modifiers, the game is not very difficult for me at the moment.

I find it ironic that in the last thread I was in someone said “new Zane is as broken as old Moze” when literally nothing about that Zane build is new and he was always capable of what that build was describing.

10 seconds later “ZANE IS LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE.”

I don’t think many people have their finger on the pulse of how this character actually works and his capabilities.

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Well just like I was saying before, Zane us probably the Most Balanced VH across his Skill Trees. He has many ways to play and aside from a few weird interactions, they are all able to work effectively.

People focus on the other VHs “insane combo” but that’s usually the only way you can build them. Non-Fade Away builds are mocked, Every Moze is exactly the same, Amara’s Phaseslam Annointed Effect is so strong you’d be stupid not to run it.

But with Zane there’s no Meta really that I’ve seen, Speed Kill is good, Cryo is good, Dopplebanger is good, Gentleman’s Facepuncher build is good.

Here, I’ll give GBX another pro-tip that they can clickbait while I’m busy with life:

Go get a Freeman launcher and equip it, enjoy the insane overkill damage if you spec properly.

OR

Get any gun with bonus splash damage anointment and use Dopplebanger (which does splash damage), have fun with your “useless” action augment doing 60-100k damage every 5 seconds.

I went through the game for Zayn and say that it was difficult to say nothing. I tried a lot of its assemblies in the skill tree … in principle, they work, not as efficiently as we would like, but they work. I hope 2k will correct his skill characteristics to a greater extent, because sometimes you play with moze and flk characters in the arena … and you just stand still, since your attacks do not mean anything. It’s lost interest to play with such characters, since playing for Zayn as much as possible can help it with a double or a shield. But anyway, after passing the game for him, I understand that I don’t even want to try playing for mouz or flk with their sky-high abilities, since I like him too much) Now, having pumped it more seriously and got good equipment, I can safely pass MH2
p.s. I think borderlands 2 was more balanced in terms of character abilities, each complementing each other

I farmed the freeman for hours in excitement for pairing it with Playing Dirty.

However, I only saw 1 rocket after PD procced.

Maybe my eyes are bad and there are two, but it was a huge disappointment.

What exactly makes the Freeman better than any other rocket launcher for zane? Even if I wanted to let an ai handle MH3 (sounds bad), what makes this specific rocket launcher better than any other?

It’s laser guided, so if you aim for the head you’re basically guaranteed to crit. Playing Dirty 8/5 will shoot 2 rockets at all times and both will crit, doing crazy damage.

Stacked with Overkill damage, it’s basically the same as my Unforgiven overkill build, except with rockets.

@BubbyR it shoots two rockets, I guarantee it.

Imagine this, but with rockets. The difference is you can self-destruct, but you also can aim for the body when you need to and still do damage, and you have damage for second winding in the event you go down.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but zanes clone cannot aim at the head. Other than playing dirty, there isn’t much unique about this build to zane that others can’t do. I’ll try it out if I ever get a rocket launcher.

lmao, not even close. How can anyone have a reasonable discussion if this is what you’re leading with?

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